Blu-ray Review: Elvis In “King Creole” Proved That His Voice Was Not His Only Redemptive Quality

A rebellious young man takes a job as a nightclub singer to make ends meet, attracting the attention of a local crime boss.

Elvis Presley singing a song titled “Crawfish” at the very beginning of the film, sets the foundation for life in the Big Easy that is filled with music, irony, and a soulful backdrop of crime and punishment on the streets of Louisiana. In his role as Danny Fisher, a young Elvis is every bit of the abrasive, sexy and unassuming character that most of us have never been able to appreciate fully, but could easily grow accustomed to. As the film opens, Danny sits on the balcony and sings along with a woman passerby on a carriage and then goes inside to discuss his last day of school and pending graduation with his sister, Mimi (Jan Shepard). She asks for reassurance that he is going to graduate and immediately reminds him of how proud his father (Dean Jagger) is going to be after Danny’s failure to graduate the previous year. Both recognize the importance of their dad having something else to focus on other than his mother’s death three years earlier, which has left him in a constant state of depression and unable to hold a steady job.

Danny’s life is forever changed when on the way to school he stops by his job as a busboy and ends up getting into a fight with one of the customers who has overstayed himself in the bar. Before being allowed to leave and go to school, Danny is forced to sing for the drunken customer’s entertainment and ends up with the responsibility of seeing to it that one of the females who is being abused by him, gets home safely. Ultimately, Danny arrives late to school and his peers pick a fight with him about the older woman, Ronnie (Carolyn Jones) in the cab who forces him to kiss her to keep her from following him inside the school. Danny is immediately sent to the principal’s office for fighting and told once again that he will not be able to graduate, this time due to his behavior. At this point, Danny decides that he is done with school and therefore must find a way to make a living to support his family. While Danny prepares to tell his father the disappointing news, he is unaware that his father has already visited the school and propositioned the leaders to allow Danny one more opportunity. This is totally against what Danny has decided for himself, but his father obtains a job and they make a deal with each other that dad will work and Danny will finish school. When Danny finds out his father is being bullied by his boss, school is no longer an option and he looks for an alternate means to earn money so his father won’t have to put up with the bully. After accepting a job that involves crime, Danny meets a new girl and at the same time gets in way over his head with a local group of thieves that have ties to the most powerful man in town, Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau).

While Danny tries to navigate his deteriorating relationship with his dad and his feelings about his new dime-store love Nellie (Dolores Hart), he starts to get more recognition for his voice and ends up with a local gig singing in one of the clubs called King Creole. When Mimi starts hanging out with his boss, Paul Stewart (Charlie LeGrand), and when Ronnie, who he rescued, turns back up along with Maxie Fields who wants him at his club, Danny seems to lose all he has ever worked for in life as he realizes he has been set up by the group of thieves he previously hung out with and his dad becomes the main pawn in the game.

This film, based on the story “A Stone For Danny Fisher” by Harold Robbins, makes us fall in love with Elvis all over again. In order to further appreciate his voice, we must truly understand the struggles of Danny’s personal life and director Michael Curtiz made certain of it by showing us the rough side of him when provoked and showing the smooth side of him when lost in his own music. In almost every scene, Danny appears to win by losing and to gain by someone else’s sacrificial offering of negotiation. In the Filmmaker’s extras focus, Leonard Maltin breaks down Elvis’ role and states that he was very believable as a character and the director’s use of black and white filming gave a more realistic tone. This is very obvious in this film alone, when time after time, Elvis’s personality comes through to show us more of what he was made of and how his music transformed all those who were able to hear it. Whether a fan or not, there are some true coping mechanisms that we all can relate to and an abundance of redemptive qualities that only Elvis could show us in his incredible role as Danny Fisher.

Available on a special Collectible Blu-ray Disc April 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment